Hello, Phobies Community!
First and foremost, we want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for your dedication, passion, and support over the past year. It’s been an amazing journey for us with many plans for the upcoming year. We couldn’t have made it this far without you all, and very much appreciate you all. Your feedback, enthusiasm, and love for the game have kept us motivated, and we are grateful for every player who continues to be part of this vibrant community.
We know there has been some discussions surrounding the recent update. We have heard you and are listening. We want to be open and honest about the balance changes we make and ensure we are involving all your feedback. We are introducing more processes internally to ensure we get your opinions and feedback early on before we make any final decisions. We do look at your feedback on a regular basis, track it and keep all that in mind when we do look at a balance pass. Our number one process is to look at our in-game telemetry to see where each Phobie is at, and we ensure there are thousands of games feeding into that telemetry for each Phobie when we do make decisions. For the most part many of the Phobies all fall into the “balanced range” with still a few that we are tuning. Your voices are important to us, and we are actively working on refining and improving the game experience for everyone.
Internally there have been a lot of changes over the past year. One big one is that I (Boss) have moved on from my role at Smoking Gun as CEO. I have decided to dedicate my time fully to Phobies now and we are growing a new team to help with publishing, community and marketing efforts alongside the development of the title. I am very excited to be taking this new step and I know that will give me 100% focus on Phobies. So please be patient with us as we find the perfect people to help us grow Phobies to what we know we can be. I do want to clarify that there will be no immediate update as this transition has been the most important focus for the last few months. Rest assured we are working on a new update, and we are also still tuning, and updating existing features so we will have another update soon.
So, what’s next for Phobies?
Here’s a sneak peek at what we’re working on for the coming months:
Improved Matchmaking We continue to monitor this and try to balance arena match making between a fair match and not too long of a wait time to get matched. This can be tricky and the more users we bring on the easier it is for us to fine tune this further. We understand that for new players getting matched with someone much higher in rank can be frustrating.
Season Packs We will be adjusting the Season pack rewards further to give them better chances at getting new Phobies.
Map Updates We hear you. Regarding some of the unloved maps, we will be rotating out some of the maps that have consistent feedback they are not liked. Even though I personally love 2 of them myself and enjoy the strategy on those.
Lights Out
Attic
Crypto
More Phobies – We are currently designing more Phobies to add to our collection these will be coming in a later update.
Community-Driven Balance Changes After gathering community feedback, we will be doing more balance changes and keeping you in the loop on these more often. Some of the ones we are still looking at, that are on our radar are.
Doc Holiday –
Billy –
Le Shovell –
Inoculus -
Repeller –
Unicorn –
Clobster –
The Collector –
Rocketman –
Cecillia –
Brutewurst –
Fantome –
Attractor –
I want to stress that some of these may be a discussion with all of you vs a change. Some of the units that people have said are overpowered for instance, are actually underpowered and have a lower win rate than we find acceptable. This can happen due to the nature of the depth in strategy and tactics of the game though, and we understand that. Some deeper strategies are not used by all players thus this can affect the win rate statistics of a specialized Phobie, because they are not utilized when spawned in an effective manner. We always want to be careful when looking at nerfing a Phobie that already has lower than average win rate as an example. This is also why we like to have thousands of games to draw our telemetry from.
Our goal is to make balance changes at a pace that keeps the game fresh without disrupting the experience too frequently. Moving forward, you can expect balance updates to occur more often. We’d love more feedback on the above list, we still have all your previous feedback as well.
I’m very excited to have the ability to just focus on Phobies now and hope I can spend a lot more time with all of you. Thank you again for all your support, feedback and suggestions.